Tag Archives: timeline

Yesterday I wrote a post about destination wedding timelines and how they are trickier to find than the standard wedding timelines that are all over Pinterest. Even with a timeline all laid out in front of you, things come up and they are difficult to stick to. I thought it might be helpful to share the actual order of events that have taken place as we have been planning our destination wedding in Mexico (so far!).

What “they” say you should have prepared…

12–9 months before wedding date:

Think about the type of wedding ceremony you both would like and the number of guests that will be attending, compile the guest list.

Research destination wedding locations and the marriage license requirements.

Choose a wedding venue.

Choose a wedding date.

Send save the dates.

Consider visiting the destination to be sure this is THE spot for you.

9–6 months before wedding date:

Review menus and packet information—get an idea of the items that you think you may want at your event.

We’re a little less than five months out from our tropical wedding in Mexico! I can’t believe how quickly time has been flying, but we gave ourselves quite a bit of time to plan (thank goodness!). There are tons and tons of wedding-planning websites and timelines and about half a billion pins on Pinterest offering help on when to do what. There are few that focus on destination weddings. I thought I would share some of the helpful timelines I have been using and somewhat following and then show you all what we have done so far and what we plan to do in the upcoming months.

A destination wedding is sometimes easier to plan because the resort does most of the work for you, that also can be quite expensive. You can plan as much of the wedding as you want, but you have to do it through email and a few (we’ve had one so far) international phone calls. It’s also tricky because people have to buy their flights much further in advance so save the dates and invitations have to go out much earlier than they do for a wedding close to home.

While in many ways I’m over planning and preparing for our wedding, this is far from the time to sit back and just stop caring about all of the details. We’ve put many many hours (and dollars) into making this day happen, and the things left to be done at the end will make or break how the day goes.

I’m talking about timelines and the logistics.

There are a lot of moving parts that go into making a wedding day happen, and when you’re running the show on your own property, there are many more pieces of the puzzle you need to think about in order for the day to go smoothly.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been putting together some extensively detailed timelines in order for everyone to know when and where things are happening.

The most important item on our wedding-day timeline is not my hair appointment or even the arrival of our guests. Our wedding-day timeline is being entirely dictated by one thing: the sun! Since we are having our wedding officiated by a rabbi, our ceremony is not able to begin until after Shabbat (Hebrew for Sabbath, or day of rest), which ends at sundown on Saturday.

I used this website to determine the time of sunset on our wedding date: in May, the sun will set in Boston at right around 8:00 PM. This was important for us to take into consideration early on, because it was a major factor in selecting a venue. Some of the venues we considered had very strict rules for when the party had to end, and that just wasn’t going to work for us! With the ceremony starting after eight o’clock, we needed plenty of time to fit in all of the fun we had planned.

We quickly realized that at this time of year, there simply wouldn’t be enough time for a ceremony, cocktail hour, dinner, and reception, all after 8:00 PM, without partying into the wee hours of the morning. The traditional wedding timeline was a bust!

I have previously mentioned that we are planning our wedding with a cocktail reception. Way back in 2007, I attended a family wedding that started later in the evening (after dinner), and I absolutely loved it. First of all, we were out-of-town guests that were able to travel down the day of (one night hotel costs versus two nights). Secondly, we got to go out for dinner before the wedding, and then show up ready to party celebrate. Not having an entire Saturday dedicated to the wedding is nice. Summers are precious, and once you hit your late 20s you start going to a lot of weddings.

When Mr. Narwhal and I discussed the idea for us a year or so ago, it became our goal. Whenever we would mention the idea to friends and family they loved it.

Planning your timeline is a little difficult when you’re going outside the norm. So…I figured it would be helpful to share how we came up with our date and timeline.

While I wait ever so patiently for our professional photographs to arrive (if you’ve been following along with my story, you know that statement is dripping with sarcasm. I cannot be patient for anything, let alone our wedding photos), I figured I’d fill my days by blogging about some of the aspects of our wedding that I didn’t get to share before wedding day.

I had a lot of questions about logistics and timelines when prepping for our big day, so I thought it might be helpful to share how our day of coordinator laid it all out for us (it alleviated a ton of pressure from myself to be able to hand this task off to a professional).

To give you some parameters, we did a first look, ceremony was set to start at 4:30pm, cocktail hour began at 6:30pm, and reception was set to end at 11:30pm. This is the timeline created by Tatiana with input from our photographer (I added some notes in italics for clarification):

Rooster (who’s been taking charge with a lot of our vendors lately) asked me a question the other day that threw me for a loop: What time do we want the photo booth to start? It’s not a difficult question to answer with our unstructured cocktail-style reception; we want people to start snapping shots some time after the ceremony is over. But like many snowballing wedding decisions, this little one hinges on a few larger outcomes. Exactly when does the ceremony end? When does it start? What time will we be done with photos?

That simple question made me realize that I needed to draft a day-of timeline sooner rather than later. Nothing set in stone (we’ll be doing that with our coordinator a little later on), but a first draft timeline that allows us to answer questions like this one.

On a Saturday morning, June 29th, I woke up and came downstairs, seeing Mr. Big bent over a writing pad and planning out the day-of timeline. A little early for that, doncha think? So I asked what that was about, and found out something that made my heart sink.

Apparently, Chinese tradition states that Mr. Big needed to lead me out of my parents’ house at 11:00 AM. Now this meant that at 11:00 AM, Mr. Big needed to get to my parents’ house and lead me out. There were initial problems to this.

The first problem was fixable. Let’s say Mr. Big is at the door to my parents’ villa. If he leads me out, he’ll see me in all my white-dressed glory, which ruins the whole “first seeing each other when I walk down the aisle” thing. Mr. Big says that he can blindfold himself before he knocks on the door and we can do both traditions (not seeing each other before the aisle walk AND the Chinese tradition of Mr. Big letting me out of the house). So”¦this problem is fixed, but the BIGGEST issue was the second one.

We met with our venue recently for the first time in about six months. We booked the place really, really early on in our engagement when most people thought we were insane, mainly so I wouldn’t have to compete with people for my date. (Apparently several people have asked about the date at the venue, so ha! I’m not insane!) I figured we could wait until closer to the date to get the nitty gritty details down. It was really nice to see the space again, and remember all of the reasons we fell in love with the place. I still love it so very much.

Either way, we were there to try to hammer out the big logistical questions, like when will the ceremony start, when will guests arriving, how long is cocktail hour, what hor d’oeuvres will we serve, who our vendors are, etc, etc, etc.

I’ve always been a list maker. I make a list and I check it twice. Call me Santa. However, this list making thing has become ridiculous ever since I got engaged. My to-do lists have morphed. This is the evolution:

1. A single to-do list: One list with a single column of bullets
Although this list started off nice and crisp, I’d put it in my purse and go on my pursuit to cross things off of the list. However, as soon as it was folded in half and put into my purse, it began to wrinkle and fold. I’d whip it out after buying all the necessities (and then some) at Target and cross it off my list. As I was trying to load all my items onto the conveyor belt, the list would get folded again and again, stuffed in my pocket or held in my mouth. By the time I got home, this list was in pretty poor shape. I’d proceed to rewrite it, eliminating all the things I already completed.

2. Two to-do lists: Two lists with a single column of bullets
I began making two to-do lists when I became a teacher. Being an elementary school teacher is a lot more work than most people imagine. You are teacher, counselor, problem-solver, conflict mediator, nurse, mentor and even mommy sometimes. This is when I began making two to-do lists. One work list. One personal list.… read more